The illustrious Google Bomb: a tactic made famous by (the soon-to-be-former) US president, George W. Bush - though not in good memory of him. On September 29th, 2006, poor Dubya was the victim of a G-Bomb. No, we’re not talking weapons of mass destruction, but mass defamation.

Have you ever tried searching for ‘miserable failure’ on Google? Today, the joke’s no longer there, but you will still see a long list of articles chronicling the tale.

A Google Bomb, also known as a link bomb, is a tactic used to influence rankings in search engines. Hijacked results are created by seeding a large number of links across the Internet pointing back to a particular site with a narrow range of keywords. The more links pointing a site using the same keywords in their anchor text, the higher that site will rank for searches for those keywords. This holds true for all of the major search engines, so the term ‘Google Bomb’ could really be Yahoo, MSN, or Ask Bomb as well.

So what happened to George? His biography was link bombed with the keywords ‘miserable’ and ‘failure’. Ouch. Imagine how painful that must be to have the internet reference as the number one website every time someone looks for a miserable failure. At least it’s done now.

Though link bombs bring up some ethical issues, every search optimizer knows that building links are the only way to the top of rankings. Still, you have to tread carefully as spammy practices will have you dropped (or even banned) from search results – much like Dubya was dropped for his moniker. Need to get to the top, but you're worried about how to get started? Give us a shout and we’ll show you how to build links the right way.